Many educators are playing the student engagement game. They wonder, “How can I get my students excited to learn? How can I ensure they will not get distracted easily?” Since tablets, Chromebooks, and smartphones have become commonplace in classrooms, the easy answer is to find a new shiny tech tool

“The essence of flipped learning is not its methodology, Education Consultant Jon Bergmann told Convene, but a question that's relevant to teachers and meeting planners everywhere: “What is the best use of face-to-face time?”

The New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), with the support of HP, produced the NMC Horizon Report > 2013 K-12 Edition. This fifth edition in the annual K-12 series of the NMC Horizon Project examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within the environment of pre-college education. Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving educators, school administrators, and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning.

Given how new MOOCs are, it’s impossible to say what their impact will be, but one thing higher ed administrators can do right now is to focus on their mission and ask if MOOCs are a tactic to help them achieve their strategic position.

I have been using text to speech almost exclusively for reading articles on the web, newspapers, and courese reading for a course in Leadership I am taking at Case Western Reserve University. I love the e-readers ( Read and Write Gold; Kindle, and Audio books) because I can jack up the speed and read with my ears as fast as non dyslexics who are fluent readers read with their eyes. We need to understand the 'cost' of eye reading to dyslexic students even when they "graduate" from OG or Wilson: the burden of phonological processing is too high in terms of fatigue. If we don't make the technology more available and acceptable in schools we will deny intelligent students with print challenges the opportunity to study in college, graduate or professional schools.

I still read paper books. Right now I am reading A light in August by Faulkner. It is on my night stand and it is a wonderful if slow experience for me. For some, print will never 'fall away' and allow for effortless decoding and pholonological recoding.--Lou

Excerpt:

"Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision..."

When most people find out that they are in line to create a new physical or virtual environment for their school, few have really driven deep into what the research says, and how it might pan out in practice.

Some 78% of the 2,462 advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project say digital tools such as the internet, social media, and cell phones “encourage student creativity and personal expression.” In addition:

96% agree digital technologies “allow students to share their work with a wider and more varied audience”79% agree that these tools “encourage greater collaboration among students”

These arguments miss the point of the MOOC, and that point is, precisely, to make education available to people who cannot afford pay the cost to travel to and attend these small in-person events. Having one instructor for 20-50 people is expensive, and most of the world cannot afford that cost. That's *why* the institutions - from which the attendees of this conference were uniquely selected - charge thousands of dollars of tuition every year.

"MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete. Yes there has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history)."

"MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete. Yes there has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history)."

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